


No Holding Back

by Riona



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Recklessness, kind of self-harm ideation?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-25 04:53:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17718419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona
Summary: Kairi and Axel's training gets a little too intense.





	No Holding Back

Kairi misses time. She wishes night would fall. She wishes she had a clock, a calendar, _something_ to give some sense of structure to this endless stretch of afternoon.

She asked Merlin, once, how much time had passed here while the world moved slowly on outside. “I’m afraid there’s no true way to measure it, my dear,” he’d said, “but what I can tell you is that I check on you twice a day.”

Merlin’s visits seem to come weeks apart.

It doesn’t seem to bother Axel. He trains when he feels like it, or when she prods him into it, or on the occasions Merlin drops by to teach them about magic; he naps when he feels like it, which, it turns out, is most of the time.

She can’t just adapt like that. She feels like this place is swallowing her up. No time, no people, apart from the two of them. The sunset is beautiful, but it’s starting to drown her.

She needs something to jolt her out of this.

-

“Hurt me,” she says.

Axel looks up from the rock he’s sitting on. “What?”

“Hurt me.” She manifests her keyblade, vanishes it, manifests it again, burning with restless energy. “I can take it.”

“Kairi—”

“Or I’ll need to learn to take it,” she says. “If I can’t.”

Axel looks at her for a moment. “Does this seem like a good idea to you?”

“I don’t care. I want you to hurt me. I—” She shakes her head. “I’m _tired_ of everyone telling me things are too dangerous.”

It’s stupid, she knows. She wants to help with the fighting, she’s finally been promised her chance, and she _can’t_ help if she gets herself seriously injured in training. It’s just...

Nothing’s felt real, for so long.

“Okay,” Axel says, standing up. “Tell you what.” He spreads his arms a little. “You manage to hurt me, maybe I’ll do the same for you.”

She lunges at him. He summons his keyblade just in time to block her swing.

“What, no hesitation at all?” he asks, half-laughing.

“I was serious.”

“Kinda stings.”

She takes a step back at once, dismisses her keyblade, leaving herself exposed. “So I managed to hurt you.”

“What, you want me to hurt you _emotionally?_ ” Axel asks. “I mean, yeah, that I could do. All you gotta do is start caring about me and wait for me to screw you over somehow.”

Kairi scrunches her nose. “You make caring about you sound so easy.”

“Ouch. You sure you’ve got no darkness in that heart of yours?”

“I’m kidding,” she says. “I care about you, Axel.”

Even after the teasing, _that’s_ the thing that makes him look like she just punched him in the chest.

She takes advantage.

“ _Ow!_ ” Axel staggers back, clutching his side. “Did you seriously just—”

“You’re the one who set the challenge.” But she casts Cure as she’s saying it; she doesn’t want to leave him in pain. “You can’t complain when I take you up on it.”

“Oh, I _can_ complain. Look at me. I’m complaining right now.”

“So?” she asks. “I got you. Did you forget your promise?”

It’s a carefully chosen barb. She’s come to learn, from their time in this place together, that he hates the idea of forgetting anything.

“I said I _might_ return the favour. I don’t know if I’d call that a promise.”

“Please,” Kairi says.

Axel hesitates.

“It wouldn’t feel right,” he says. “You just letting me hit you.”

Kairi lets out a breath. She can’t say she doesn’t understand his reluctance. It’s probably for the best.

He weighs his keyblade in his hand for a moment, tilts it from side to side, inspecting it. “So we’re gonna fight.”

It’s clear from his tone that he’s not talking training. She looks sharply from his keyblade to his face. “You mean it?”

“I won’t hold back if you don’t.” He pauses. “Just so we’re both clear on this, this is a bad idea.”

“I’m fine with that,” she says. “I feel like everyone expects me to be... so sensible and cautious, all the time. I need to do something stupid.”

“Wow,” Axel says. “No one has ever expected me to be sensible. You’ll have to tell me what it’s like.”

He throws a fire spell at her, no warning, no word to start the fight. She tries to dive out of the way, instinctively, but it catches her and pain flares up along her arm and—

—it hurts, it hurts _badly_ , and he’s really been holding back in their training, hasn’t he?

“By the way,” he says, “I fight dirty.”

“How is that different from hitting me when I’m not fighting back?” But she’s almost laughing through the pain as she says it.

“Not too late to call the whole thing off.”

She strikes out at him with her keyblade.

It’s a fight, it’s a _real_ fight at last. He’s more experienced than her, and it shows, but she’s managing to stay on her feet. She laughs a little, breathless with exertion and pain, and Axel’s starting to laugh as well.

In a strange way, it feels like she’s connecting with Sora and Riku again, even though they’re not here. She’s been feeling a strange distance from them lately; their experiences have been so different, the two of them off battling Heartless while she went to school. But she can fight as well. That feels like something she can share with them now.

“Did you ever fight my friends?” she asks, blocking his keyblade on a downswing. “Sora? Riku?”

“Riku, no.” He leaps back from her counterattack. “Sora, yes. Not sure he remembers it, though.”

There’s distaste in his tone. Doesn’t like forgetting things; doesn’t like being forgotten.

“He didn’t get it memorised?” she asks, innocently.

“Hey.” He lashes out at her; she barely manages to roll out of the way. This started out as her asking for pain, but the spike of exhilaration when she dodges an attack might beat the moments she actually gets hit. “That’s not _your_ catchphrase.”

“What was he like?” she asks, when she’s caught her breath.

“Sora? Better than you.”

“Hey!” Her keyblade strikes off his in a shower of hot sparks.

“To be fair, he’d had a lot more practice.” Axel shrugs. “Or maybe I’m just a crappy teacher.”

Kairi half-laughs, although her lungs can’t afford it. “Yeah, that’s probably it.”

“You’re still fun. Hadn’t realised how much I’d missed this.”

He manages to break her guard, strikes a blow to her shoulder that drops her to one knee. She braces her hand on the ground for a moment, panting through gritted teeth.

“You think you’ve got whatever it is you needed from this?” Axel asks. “’Cause I really don’t want to have to tell Merlin I beat you to death next time he visits.”

What did she need? To feel something? To connect with Sora and Riku? To connect with Axel? To get some _real_ combat experience, so she doesn’t walk into the final confrontation underprepared?

She’s aching all over, she’s breathing so hard her chest hurts, she’ll need to use some magic on her burns soon if she doesn’t want permanent damage. But she feels like she’s really here at last, in this moment, not just floating through endless indistinguishable time.

She looks up at him. “I want to do this again. Another day. Or—” No days here, right? “Another time.”

“That’s a _really_ bad idea,” Axel says, breaking into a grin. “I’d love to.”


End file.
